Re: [PHP4BETA] compiler ?

At 17:51 30/07/99 , Manuel Lemos wrote:

Hello Zeev, On 30-Jul-99 12:29:48, you wrote:

    further, another thing that confuses me is that zend'll execute some
    machine independent intermediate codes in the future release.
    that means zend understands machine independent binary codes and
    scripts as well ?
    so what about the efficiency issue between the above two ?

Yes, but I think you think way too much of what 'understanding' platform independent intermediate code is. It means nothing but having a loader that was written to understand files across platforms. Let me see if I got this right. The compiler that is going to be a paid product already does something that PHP 4 does at run-time, right? So, the way I see, nothing is stopping somebody to hack PHP 4 to write the compiled scripts back to disk so they can be loaded like if they were generated by the paid product. This way people that used that possible hacked version of PHP 4 won't have to pay for the compiler product. Is this right? I know that the paid product is meant to be also an optimizer besides being a compiler. But if you can still compile the scripts without paying for the compiler/optimizer, I guess at least some people will not buy it because it already compiles the scripts obfuscating the code enough to let them distribute the scripts without giving the source. Am I missing something? Anyway, in practice what does this compiler/optimizer does to make it more attractive/faster, if I may ask?

Several features - it's going to be a fairly feature rich product. Speed isn't one of the features - there's no speed improvements involved in the entire idea of the script->file compiler. People can always write their own software, in this case they'd stand the option of licensing the script to file compiler that'll be supported by Zend, platform independent, optimized and fairly powerful - or writing their own hacked version.

Another question: how is it going to be sold, source with a license or precompiled binaries/libraries?

We can't give this information at this time. It's way too early. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/ For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il